


Of The Tide and The Sea

by yeoltidecarol



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Professors, Angst, F/M, Fluff, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-07 12:16:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16853815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yeoltidecarol/pseuds/yeoltidecarol
Summary: Junmyeon is an art professor who finds himself smitten and overcome by you, his graduate TA





	Of The Tide and The Sea

The whole of his Ph.D amounts to you.

His work, his lectures, the papers, the art, it all amounts to nothing but a pathway to you. Junmyeon knows these things the moment he meets your eyes, and thinks he should feel frustration or contempt, but all he can muster is the glorious acceptance of fate. It nestles in his veins like a simple syrup, sticking to all the secret parts of him and making his blood feel like sugar. Somehow, every brush stroke held a whisper of your pull. Somehow, every enchanting sculpture assumed your shape. Like he had been expecting you. Like he had been waiting.

You’re assigned to him as a department assistant, there to help, to grade papers, to prepare slides of paintings and people, and to learn from him all the things a book or museum cannot. Standing in his office, you are tall and confident and attentive, studying the way he’s surrounded himself in art - likely all the missing shades of you - and he nearly buckles under the weight of his longing.

He’s meant to be your guide, but he looks at you and feels and sees all the things he has not; all the lonely parts of him bending forward and begging you for the education of a life unlived. Never has he craved, not like this, not with a desire so profound and disruptive that he vividly envisions the end of his career and grasps at it with greedy fingers.

When he looks at you, he fancies breaking rules. When he looks at you, he fancies danger and the nakedness of Renaissance art, and the blush of viewers - no, his blush. He sees dresses of silk with exposed wrists and ankles, eyes of subjects asking to live and to die and to touch, and finally understands why he found art so moving in its temptations. He gets it now, that the desire within a frame was never enough to be merely viewed, it had to be felt, and experienced from the inside out. All he needed was to see you.

When he looks at you, he sees blue - but it isn’t the simplified navy, a plain shade overused by social media apps, advertisements, and fucking Google. No. He looks at you and to him you are nothing but cerulean and aqua, bold and complex and vibrant - radiant and loud in all the ways the ocean is deafening. You fill him the way the sea fills the open spaces of the earth, molding into caverns and scars he didn’t know he had and didn’t know needed to be healed. You’re Madonna and you’re Venus, you’re the sea and you’re the stars, and he thinks the world has done nothing but paint you for an eternity.

When he reaches for your hand to shake, he thinks of himself as the tide to your low moon, reaching and retreating with such speed you hardly acknowledge the action. He thinks you hardly remember he was there at all.

\---

Junmyeon is compressed into smallness by the force of his fear. There is yearning here, in these tight spaces, a yearning for you and your sighs and your hands. Your hands, covered in paint and calloused by wooden brushes. Your wet _mouth_ , saying it is never enough to stand in museums and watch, it is always about giving yourself to the canvas until you are dry.

His yearning flexes with the elasticity of his skin when he moves and breathes, growing in a yawn that is both thunderous and silent. There are questions he wants to ask, things he wants to say, all of them forbidden and none of them appropriate, but they claw at him in irresistible ways and the only one he can blame for this torture is himself. There is nowhere for his devotion to go and his head is loud with the regret of choices he has made, and has yet to make. And he is _aching_ , sore and sick with the thought of possibility. Everyday, he sees and smells you, and everyday his tongue grows heavier - making it harder to speak or eat or do anything but think of kissing you.

Idly you lounge on the couch in his office, essays in a pile at your side, on the floor, and a pen between your lips, chewing and humming. He should be grading, he should be helping, he should be taking, but instead he is sketching.

His mind is cluttered with thoughts of you and he is ashamed of the mess he has made, but never ashamed of the images for they are pieces of your whole. He’s blurred them together to make room for more where there is none. The details have faded and smeared but they are all there, in his head, and now they are finally choosing to live on paper. You were always better at this than he, adept with tracing and shading, but he doesn’t think he needs to make your lines so defined - you are too many things, too many beautiful things, to have just one shape.

This is when he is emptying himself at a well, and the only thing that could fill him up again is you. Over and over, a cauldron of nothing but a resolute system of love; a ritual of consumption and creation, and all of it transcendent in its majesty.

\---

Today, he is walking you home in the rain and he thinks he’s seen this before in a painting or a film. He tries to remember the script of it, or the framing - the distance between the subjects or the colour of the umbrella, but decides that even though none of it matches, his reality is infinitely better.

Today, you are yellow. You are carrying the sun with you, tucked neatly beneath your skin, so that only you and only he can see it. You are carrying the sun and making light where there is none, breaking the clouds with your laughter and your voice, and he’s overwhelmed in anticipation of the day you create a rainbow. He believes he will crumble, falling at your feet with a smile and a plea of _let me be yours, I am nothing but yours._

Today, he is hopeful. He knows the area where you live quite well and thinks you should have at least been in your neighborhood by now, but you have walked him down the same road four times and it’s clear you are stalling. Of all days, wouldn’t this be the one where you rush to be dry? Wouldn’t this be the one where you covet the comforts of home with a frustration born entirely out of work and commuting? He doesn’t mention this, not explicitly. He plays dumb and pretends he is lost, and jokes that _this store looks nothing like the other ones we’ve passed_ to see if you catch on or interrupt the walk, a teasing test. But you shake your head, and smile, playing along, and say _well yes, they all look the same in some way because they’re a chain._

It isn’t. It’s a family run florist. You want him as much as he wants you, at least for today.

___

There is no reason for you to be there, not now anyway. No exams, no papers, no hours in session, you had no reason to be in his office breathing heavily and looking serious. You shut the door behind you so quietly he almost didn’t notice - almost. He’d sensed you the minute you entered the hall, and when he heard the determination in your footsteps he had to remember to look distracted when you entered the room. He had to convince you he wasn’t paying attention, even though he thinks his soul will always find you even if his eyes are slow and ill prepared.

The glasses on his nose suddenly feel heavy as he looks at you, and he narrows his brow because today you are too many colours battling for dominance. He’s never seen you so unsure and conversely so resolved, so he comes to stand with his hands in his pockets and his chest racing in worry.

‘Are you ok?’ he asks. This is unplanned. He smothers a scoff. You were unplanned, all of this was unplanned, and he thinks it’s ironic he still isn’t immune to surprise.

‘No,’ is your curt reply.

He bites his lip and nearly howls. Something has upset you. He thinks momentarily this is about him, but he stops himself. Your world does not begin and end with him, the hours in your day expanding painfully onward without him and he should never allow himself to be so arrogant to think yours are filled with him the way he is never truly free of you.

‘How can I help?’

‘Kiss me.’

He doesn’t move, legs of stone and feet one with the earth - roots of iron spawning beneath his feet at your request. In an ideal world, he’s already be pawing at your mouth with a desperation bordering on biblical but he can’t truly believe this is real. And when reality finally caresses his cheek, he is buried in nothing but consequence.

‘I have tried,’ you explain, ‘to show you that I want you, and I have also tried to not want you. And if I walk out of here knowing nothing else can or will happen, I at least need to know that I tried. That we tried.’

Junmyeon doesn’t need more than this, doesn’t need reasons or the will of a warrior, he just needs your voice, breathless and imploring him to try, in order to feel brave. He crosses the office in fewer steps than he thinks is possible in such a space, but he’s there and you are in his arms, and he can finally _taste_ you.

You are jubilant and impossible to hold. You’re all over him, everywhere at once like a chemical reaction, and his lips press against yours in all the ways he’s imagined after weeks and weeks of watching but never touching. When you sigh, he feels a thrill in his spine. When you moan into him, he thinks he may die. Your tongue is wet and warm and curious, and he matches all its strength with his own.

You crash over him, the great sea of you filling him and leaving him empty in a rhythm that matches your tongue and he pulls away to catch his breath. He watches you with wide, wet eyes, and curses himself that he cannot etch himself into your bones. He wants to linger there, forever and always, marking places only he can touch and only the dust of time can see.

He presses you against the door, fisting his hands in your hair, and this he thinks is the way museums were meant to be enjoyed. Anything created in one visceral moment should never be immobile or unloved; never had a subject been painted without being held or handled, and never would he lift his arms or mouth from you again.

At the end of the world, he’d say image is forever but taste is what resonates, in the mouth and in the heart; art is undignified in its justice, unfair and inadequate. At the end of the world, he’d say your ocean waves washed over him and dragged him out, pulled him from all the corners he been hiding in for years, for decades, and set him afloat in absolution.

At the end of the world, he’d say we _tried._


End file.
